CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Oh, good job, Master Chef, the cinnamon buns are burning.
Maggie lunged across the kitchen and yanked open the oven. Sure enough, they were completely ruined.
Damn. No amount of glazing was going to fix that.
“For heaven’s sake,” Coralee exclaimed, dashing into the kitchen and waving the smoke away from her face. “That’s the second batch that’s gone up this morning!”
Maggie pulled on Lexie’s pug mitts, grabbed the ruined cinnamon buns and set them clattering on top of the stove. “What on earth happened to the timer?”
Coralee peered at it. “Don’t look like it was set proper. You feeling okay? If you don’t mind me sayin’, you ain’t yourself this morning.”
“I didn’t sleep well,” Maggie told her. Or at all. Who knew running a business and having a social life could be so exhausting? Except that she wasn’t only exhausted. The plate she’d cracked this morning, the failed cinnamon buns, the dropped bag of flour, all of it came from not having her feet on the ground where they should be.
“The after-church crowd’s coming,” Maggie fretted, pulling off the mittens. “We’ve got to feed them something.”
While Coralee disposed of the charred remains, Maggie brought her roll of “emergency dough” out of the freezer. Not as tasty as cinnamon buns, but it would have to do. Maybe a nice cream cheese icing? She took a sharp knife and cut the roll into thick slices. A horrible thought occurred to her: were these sudden-onset kitchen disasters a way for her to not have to deal with her feelings about Jake?
Last night was the best night of her entire life.
Last night, Jake had kissed her until she couldn’t remember her name.
Last night, she’d almost changed her mind about the perils of dating devastatingly handsome men.
And while she was on the subject, how did you go from the best night of your life to this? How did you go from kissing a man like Jake under the stars to just another day of “business as usual”?
The bell above the door jingled. Maggie went out front, trying hard not to think about kissing. There stood Todd with his two kids. And he looked like a real estate salesman with a bridge to sell.
“Hey, Maggie,” he said, all dimples and cowboy hat. “Burn something?”
Oh, crap, she thought miserably. Somebody just go ahead and kill me.
Todd’s son, Sawyer, gazed up at her, his face clean-scrubbed and earnest. Abigail had on another pink bonnet. She sucked her mouth in and out and made bubbles.
Maggie smiled warmly at Sawyer, but her smile disappeared by the time it got to Todd. “Make it quick. I’m having a terrible morning.”
“Sawyer has something to ask you that should make it all better,” Todd said. “Don’t you, Sawyer?”
“What is it, sweetheart?” she asked the boy. He blinked up at her and her heart lurched around in her chest. It wasn’t his fault that his parents were selfish jerks. He opened his mouth and then closed it. His gaze skittered away.
“He wants to invite you to his birthday,” Todd said. “Wednesday, four o’clock, at the municipal park.”
Before Maggie could answer, the door opened and in walked Priscilla and April, dressed in their Sunday church clothes. Priscilla’s nostrils flared the minute she got a whiff of Todd. Oh, boy. Maggie could already see the fur fly.
“Whaddyou know?” Priscilla drawled, stabbing Todd with her eyeballs. “I thought I smelled smoke and brimstone, and here you are. I don’t remember seeing this much of you when we were in-laws.”
Maggie would have felt sorry for Todd if he weren’t such a dick. He nodded to her and then edged out of the bakery, using his kids as a shield. She watched him herd poor Sawyer across the street as if the bakery was on fire.
Priscilla frowned and tugged her blazer into place.
“Did you have to be so mean in front of his kids?” April asked, always the tender heart.
“I can’t stand the sight of that man,” Priscilla said. “Every time I turn around he’s sucking up to your sister. Makes me madder than a sprayed roach.”
Maybe it was a good thing her family had decided to pay her a Sunday visit. They always did a great job of keeping her feet on the ground. Maggie skirted the counter and headed for the espresso machine, knowing everyone would want coffee.
“You’re back from church early,” she said.
Priscilla plopped herself at a café table. She was wearing her new heels, the ones she’d gotten at the outlet mall off Interstate-10. They looked painful, but pain had never stopped Priscilla. “Your father had a stomach upset. Out of sheer decency to the folks sitting next to us, we sent him home.”
Maggie spooned coffee into a filter and glanced curiously at April. Something was up. More than just her father’s bowels had brought them here.
April hopped up on a stool by the counter. Out of the corner of her eye, Maggie could see Priscilla gesturing to April to say something that Maggie already knew she wasn’t going to like.
“So I came by to say hi last night, only you weren’t home,” April said with a sly attempt at acting casual.
Maggie busied herself with the cups and saucers. “I was out with Gus.”
“You were?” April exchanged a look with Priscilla. “Gus barked like anything when I knocked on the door.”
“I was asleep.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Priscilla burst out. “Mary McFiggen saw you leaving last night with a man!”
Maggie pressed the button for hot water, fighting the urge to scream. Dating in Cuervo was enough to make you swear off religion. She’d known this would happen. Now she’d have to explain herself—and she didn’t want to explain herself. Her brain had short-circuited. But Priscilla wasn’t going away until she got some answers.
“Fine,” Maggie said. “I went out with Jake Sutton.”
There was a little yip and something crashed in the kitchen.
Terrific. Now Coralee knew. Now everybody knew.
“I don’t know what made me think I could keep my private life, you know, private,” Maggie fumed while she brought out the cups of coffee and set them on the table. “It was pretty crazy of me, now that I think about it. A woman pushing thirty, going on a date with a single man. That’s worth at least a dozen phone calls around town right there.”
Priscilla gazed up at her with the faux-innocence of a mother who’d been on the prowl for sons-in-law since her girls were in diapers. “I’m just happy to see you going out again, sweetheart. That’s all.”
Oh, that was far from all. Maggie could practically hear Coralee holding her breath back there, rubbing her hands together, hanging on every word.
Priscilla sipped her coffee and then clicked the cup back on its saucer. “Being filthy rich isn’t a bad thing, you know. There are plenty of nice men out there who—”
“Don’t give me the pitch, Mom. I’m not dating Jake because of his money.”
“I know what we’ll do,” Priscilla said, conveniently ignoring her. “We’ll invite him over for dinner, like we did that time with Mason. You remember—when he and Cassidy first started dating. Then he can see what nice folks we are and that you were raised by a decent family.”
“No,” Maggie said louder than she meant to. It worried her to see that distracted look on her mother’s face, the one that meant she was plotting, planning, devising ways to pull him in. She didn’t want Jake getting the wrong idea about things. She didn’t want him thinking that he was being scrutinized as potential husband material. She didn’t want him believing she had “designs” on him, period.
On a flare of panic, she said, “There will be no inviting. Jake and I are nowhere close to the dinner-with-family stage.”
Priscilla barely heard her. “I’d better go check on your father.” She stood and gathered her purse. “April, are you coming? I may need you to run to the pharmacy for me later.”
Maggie opened her mouth to argue. Priscilla needed to understand that Jake was strictly a hands-off situation. “Mom!” she said. “Tell me you heard what I said. No inviting Jake to dinner until I say so.”
Halfway out the door, Priscilla turned around and beamed at her. “Of course, honey. I wouldn’t dream of it. You’re a grown woman. Jake is your business and he’s going to stay that way.”
* * * *
Jake pulled off his yellow hard hat and stood looking into the theater. The place was a disaster. Old flooring and rotted lumber lay in stacks, ready to be busted up and hauled away. The air was hazy with dust. A dozen workmen were pulling down termite-eaten beams that couldn’t be salvaged. Taking apart an old building might be an exciting part of the process, but it was nerve-racking as hell. Jake hated the idea of missing something that might have been made beautiful again.
The old girl was on life support, he thought with a pang. The Regal was on the brink of being…well, not a newer, younger version of herself. If she were young, she wouldn’t be as interesting. No, he was giving her a chance to shine again in all her gloriously fascinating imperfection.
“I’m heading out,” he told Pete, who stood behind him frowning at blueprints. “I’ll feel better once we get all this crap hauled away. Then we’ll really know what we’re dealing with.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Pete said. “On a project like this, there are always problems. You can expect them. But at least we’re getting closer to figuring out what they are.”
Jake took one last look at his theater, buoyed by his vision of what the Regal would be once he finished with her. Restorations were a battle with time, and time was always working against you.
“You going home?” Pete asked him. “If not, my wife and I would be happy to have you over for dinner. You know we don’t live close to Cuervo, but we’re not that far either.”
Jake smelled a fix-up. Pete and his wife Shaylene, nice middle-aged folks who followed high school football and played a round of golf every Sunday, were convinced he needed a woman in his life—not because of his money, but because they’d decided he was lonely. It would have been funny if it weren’t also mildly annoying. He’d been to dinner with them three times and there was always a single female relative there.
“Actually, I’ve got a date tonight,” Jake told him. “We’re meeting up at the ranch. Gotta get over there before she shows up so I can wash some of this dirt off.”
“You don’t say?” Pete scratched his cheek where a patch of silver stubble grew. “The missus will be disappointed.”
That meant for sure there’d been a fix-up. Last time it had been a schoolteacher cousin who’d sat staring at her placemat the whole night. Shaylene kept kicking her under the table. He knew because once or twice Shaylene missed the cousin and kicked him instead.
“Well, maybe if things keep going well with Maggie, I can bring her over,” Jake told him. They strolled out to his car, which was parked on the street in front of the theater.
“Good luck on that date.” Pete winked at him, which made Jake feel like he was a teen in the fifties going to a sock hop. He started the car and glanced at the dashboard clock, realizing he’d have to make tracks if he wanted to get everything ready for Maggie tonight.
After his meeting with the foremen yesterday, he’d wandered over to the bakery around noon, hoping to catch her. There she was taking that ridiculous dog for a walk. She’d knelt down to adjust something on his collar and a few spirals of dark hair had tumbled into her face.
He watched, undetected, enjoying the view and thinking he’d never seen a more irresistible woman.
When Maggie stood, she saw him. Her eyes held his for a long moment. Then she did something very un-Maggie-like: she blushed and looked away.
He would have taken her right there on the sidewalk if he could. To hell with being a gentleman. He was about to explode.
“When’s your day off?” Jake asked.
He remembered her blush intensifying. “Tomorrow,” she said. “Monday.”
“Let’s go horseback riding at the ranch.” He’d managed to smile then, even though his blood surged like it was boiling in his veins.
Even now, just sitting in his car thinking about that brief conversation yesterday, his blood heated. To distract himself, he turned on the radio. A reporter was interviewing the son of a celebrity dying of stage-four cirrhosis of the liver.
Like his mother.
He quickly silenced the radio. Then he passed one hand over his mouth, a little shaken, sure, but determined not to let it get to him. Goddamn Loretta. It felt as though she were reaching out for him across the airwaves. He’d even had a dream last night where he was lost and every street he turned down was the street he’d grown up on.
If thoughts of Loretta pushed at him, he’d just push back. It’s not going to work, Mother. I’m not coming to see you. You can die just the way you always wanted—alone.
By the time he drove into Willow Ridge, he was calmer and more focused on the task at hand. He caught up with one of the stable boys who was coming out of the tack barn with a coil of rope.
“I need you to saddle up the mare and that brown Morgan for me in about an hour,” he said.
“Going on the trails, sir?” the kid asked. “If you need a guide, I’d be happy to ride out with you.”
Jake grinned. A chaperone? Not quite what he had in mind. He shook his head. “Do you know where Mrs. Birch is? I didn’t see her car.”
“I think she went into town, sir. Maybe an hour ago?”
Jake set out for the house. Did he even have Mrs. Birch’s cell number? Well, he’d just have to improvise something for dinner.
The bigger guest bathroom, which was where he showered, had a window overlooking the driveway into Willow Ridge. He kept an eye out for Maggie’s pickup, ran the electric razor over his face—just in case there was kissing—and then threw on jeans, a T-shirt and his Black Jack alligator-skin cowboy boots. He knew from experience that you could kick a lot of shit with those things.
Every minute brought him one minute closer to seeing Maggie. He had plans for their trail ride. Big plans. Maybe that magic moment would happen when she’d finally see that he wasn’t just trying to get into her pants.
The problem was he hadn’t figured out yet what he did want to get into. Not marriage or kids. The last thing he needed was to ruin some kid’s life the way Loretta had ruined his.
He saw Maggie’s truck bouncing along the road that led to the house, and his heart rate kicked up a few beats. Jake went outside just as she was pulling up, gravel pinging the inside of her wheel wells, all country girl sexy in the old Chevy pickup with its rounded edges and decorative spare tire on the side.
She hopped down from the cab wearing blue jeans and a faded gingham shirt tied at the waist. When she turned around to get something, Jake feasted his eyes on her sweet curvy bottom. Holy crap, he had no idea she looked that hot in a pair of jeans. He whipped his gaze back to her face where it belonged, but everything about this woman reminded him she was trouble.
There was trouble in the way she looked at him, half-challenging and half-seductive, chin up, breasts straining the seams of her top. There was trouble in the way she stomped around in those boots, as though determined to show him this other side to her personality.
And there was plenty of trouble in how much he liked it.
This Maggie knew how to honky-tonk. Get a couple of beers in her and she might have ripped her top off and ridden the mechanical bull.
Jake wiped his face with one hand. If he didn’t have sex with her soon, he was going to be spending an awful lot of time in the shower.
“Hey,” she said, giving him the once over. “I’ve never seen you in a T-shirt before. You look…nice.”
Nice. What did that even mean?
“If I start talking about what I think of you in those jeans, we’re never going to get out of here,” he said, directing her toward the barn. “Let’s catch what’s left of the day.”
The stable boy came out with the horses saddled and bridled. They ambled after him, tails swishing, hoofs making that clop clop sound that brought Jake instantly back to his childhood. His greatest joy had been horses, and most of those were the patient old mares on his uncle’s farm. Both these horses had an intelligent look to their eyes, and there was spirit in them, too.
“This handsome boy is Atlas,” Maggie said, petting the Morgan’s muzzle. “But I’m more used to riding Delilah.”
“She’s all yours then.” It made sense that Maggie was familiar with Mason’s horses. She may have even ridden them by herself sometimes. Jake watched her long fingers combing through Atlas’s mane and had to look away.
Christ, she was killing him.
He assumed Maggie would need a mounting block to get on a horse that stood fifteen hands high. Instead, she shoved one booted foot in the stirrup and swung a leg over easily. Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be, he thought. What have I gotten myself into?
Maggie gave him a laughing, defiant look. Then she clicked her tongue and Delilah took off, leaving him to mount Atlas and chase after her.
Jake grabbed the reins, swung himself over the saddle and dug his heels into Atlas’s warm flanks. The horse snorted, and he wheeled its head around in the direction of the trail. He could see Maggie up ahead at full gallop, back arched with her long hair jerking behind her. Don’t think for one minute I won’t catch you, cupcake. In the end, I always win.
Absorbed by the rhythmic drumbeat of Atlas’s hoofs, Jake kept his eyes on Maggie and the chestnut mare. He could tell that Maggie was in her element, wild and untamable. Annie Oakley if Annie had liked horses as much as she’d liked guns. She didn’t even look behind her to see if he was there.
Damn if he didn’t like her even more for it.
By the time they reached the sound of the river, Maggie was so far ahead, he couldn’t see her anymore. Atlas kept tearing up the trail and churning dust. There was no stopping him. Jake kept his weight forward, absorbing the vibrations of Atlas’s hoofs through his body and feeling the wind blasting in his ears.
Then they rounded a bend and there stood Delilah with her nose down, nibbling, as unconcerned as though she’d been taken out for a morning stroll.
Maggie grinned at him with all the adorable naughtiness of a girl caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Her eyes were brilliant, her cheeks flushed. She knew she’d won this round.
“Well, I’ve got to hand it to you,” she said. “You’re not just a suit. I guess you do know how to ride after all.”
Jake eased up on the bit so Atlas could graze. The horse was breathing hard and might need the break. “And you know how to fly a horse. I didn’t even know horses could fly.”
“Delilah’s a good girl, aren’t you, sweetheart?” She patted Delilah’s neck and the mare whinnied softly in response.
Jake couldn’t stop marveling at this new woman, this new Maggie. Maybe it was a little disconcerting when you thought you had someone pegged and then they pulled a fast one on you. Or in this case, a fast horse.
So far, he’d seen three Maggies. There was Bakery Maggie, brisk and in charge. Then he’d seen Date Maggie, a temptress in a red dress. He liked that one a lot.
But now there was Wild Maggie. Jake could have chased her all day and not gotten tired of it. The sky, the speed, the exhilaration had his blood pumping. He wanted to drag her off that horse, strip her naked and see how she tasted after a ride like that.
Just thinking about it made him sweat.
“I love horses,” Maggie said. “I was one of those horse-crazy girls with the posters and the plastic figurines and the dog-eared copy of Black Beauty. When Cassidy and Mason bought Willow Ridge, I instantly fell in love with the place.”
Jake took a deep breath and tried to clear his head. She’d cast a spell over him. He couldn’t even think straight. All he could see was the lush carnality of her mouth and the thrust of her breasts and the cowgirl swagger. Desire ate at him like a wolf.
But in just that moment, Jake thought he might have discovered something. With the land beneath him and Maggie beside him…what if he’d been looking for this? His life in Dallas, the revolving harem of women, deals lost and deals won…were they old snakeskins he could shed and leave behind him on the trail? This new Jake wasn’t checking his phone every two seconds. This new Jake breathed fresh air and barely cringed at the thought of just one woman. This woman. Maggie.
She turned Delilah back to the trail and he rode alongside her, wanting to ask her things but hating to spoil the enchantment of the moment. A hawk glided overhead, its shadow rippling over the trees and grass. The air smelled of wild flowers and warm dirt and the sweat of the horses. About half a mile away, the prairie gave way to two rounded hills that reminded him of a woman’s breasts. The trail led to a shallow slope dotted with pines on one side, and the remains of a split log fence on the other.
“You look like a man who found the answer to something,” she said, glancing at him.
“Maybe.”
She raised her face to the sun while he watched her, wanting. Restless. Hungry.
“I don’t know a lot about you,” she said. “I want to.”
“Go ahead.” But Jake knew he was bullshitting. This was an old game women played. They liked to pry you open and see what was inside. But he could play, too. Make them think they’d gotten somewhere and then just shut them down.
She seemed to think about what she wanted to ask him. “Okay, what’s the cheesiest song you know all the lyrics to?”
Easy. “Our Love is Here to Stay,” written by George Gershwin, popularized by Frank Sinatra. But like hell he was going to tell her he loved sentimental old songs.
“‘Highway to Hell,’” he said. “Especially the part that goes, ‘Hey, Satan, paid my dues.’”
“Have you?” she asked, clearly curious. “Paid your dues?”
What a leading question. Ah, Maggie. She’d never stop trying to get him to open up, would she? The problem was, he’d never opened up to anybody. What was the point? He’d always been a loner. Wealth hadn’t changed that. If anything, wealth had made it worse. It made him suspect the motives of everyone who tried to get close.
Jake tried to get comfortable with answering questions, but it would have been easier to get comfortable with Atlas’s rocking gait. Maggie’s presence was too real. Too near.
“I started my first business when I was in high school,” he said, hoping to satisfy her curiosity the safe way, by telling her the same stories she might have read about him in a magazine. “Palestine, Texas. It was even more of a shit hole when I grew up there. Remember when the space shuttle blew up? Most of the pieces fell on Palestine. They kept finding chunks of it for weeks—in pools, on roofs. In Palestine, all we had besides space junk were pump jacks and pine trees. But we also had a fair number of retirees. So I opened up a putting green.”
“A putting green?” she said. “Like for golf?”
“My uncle had some land. I worked my ass off tilling, planting grass, drilling drain holes. Hell, I hated golf. But I knew there’d be money in it.” He smiled, remembering how eagerly he’d count out the day’s earnings, the smell of those damp wrinkled bills. “By the time I went to college, I had quite a lot put away. That’s when I started investing in real estate.”
At first it had been empty lots in promising locations. Then parking lots that he leased to businesses. Finally, office buildings. His junior year of college, he was worth a quarter of a million dollars. Mason, his frat brother, used to call him Golden Boy.
Then Jake met a guy in the quad named Vishal Batra. Vishal had an idea for harnessing solar energy without the bulky panels. Jake invested, they formed a company, and within three years they sold that company for a healthy profit.
Jake liked telling Maggie his success story. Loretta wasn’t in it and he came off sounding like a hero. Strange how sentimental he could get about a past that had also seen its share of failures: the hard lessons of why you had to separate business from friendship. Why long-term investments were better than a quick fix.
Why serious relationships were nothing more than a distraction.
Back then it was all go go go and money money money. Was that changing? Should he be angry that Maggie made him want more?
They dismounted and then walked the horses down the slope to drink from the river. Sun filtering down through the trees created a dappled effect on the water. A few boulders sat in the middle, the water churning white around them. Deer tracks led up to the river’s edge.
Maggie found a spot and dropped down, hugging her knees to her chest. Jake sat beside her, aware of his sudden moody discontent. He was struggling with something but didn’t know what it was yet. It made him tense.
Part of it was this sudden urge to tell Maggie his whole life story. The real one. The one only his lousy brother knew. The feeling was right fucking there. How pathetic was that? He wanted to tell her what happened when he’d come home from school. How his mother would be so passed out drunk, he’d have to hold a mirror under her nose just to see if she was still breathing. How he was actually afraid of losing her, this woman who used to pet his hair and tell him stories when she wasn’t slurring her words.
Worse than admitting to Maggie that he was damaged was admitting how badly he wanted her. How just being next to her made his heartbeat pound faster than their horses’ hoofs galloping up the trail.
Maggie watched him. Her eyes were dark and luminous. They had glints in their depths. But it seemed as though she were dealing with a few issues of her own.
“May I ask you something?” she said in a strangled voice.
He really didn’t want to talk anymore, but couldn’t tell her that. Why the fuck did he even care?
“How are we going to end, Jake?” she asked him softly. “What happens once you decide it’s over?”